MY BED SHAKES VIOLENTLY as my bunkmate leaps down to the floor. Morning has broken, and I’m still heavy with wine. My tongue has stuck firmly to the roof of my mouth, and my soul is barren, laid waste, devoid of enthusiasm. I just want to curl up and die. As I loosen my tongue I taste red wine and garlic. The light comes on and with it more brain pain as the Euro babble reaches unprecedented levels. So I bury myself in my ripped sleeping bag the best way I can and wake a few hours later to total peace and quiet . . . and fear . . . Jesus! What was I up to last night? Pangs of Roman Catholic guilt rack my brain. What did I say to the priest?
Oh no! I hope I didn’t volunteer for anything I shouldn’t have!
It takes me an age to get going as the stout Spanish lady comes into the room with her mop and bucket. I frighten her as much as she does me and her look says it all . . . I need to leave!
It’s 7:30 a.m and my head is still pounding. I know I did or said something to someone but I can’t remember what.
Why do I drink so much? I curse myself.
I say goodbye to San Juan de Ortega and get back on track.
The gorgeous German girl is now walking toward me. I remember seeing her last night but avoided her due to my shabby appearance and even shabbier behavior, and now she is heading my way.
She smiles as she approaches, and I don’t know where to look.
“Forgotten something?” I stupidly ask.
To which she replies telepathically, “No shit, Sherlock!”
I feel immediately foolish but manage to catch another glimpse of her tidy arse as my hands and whole body begin to itch like crazy.
Dark clouds gather across the stony mountainside and I catch up with Sonja and Alyssa.
Sonja laughs. “Hey, you were very drunk last night!”
“I know,” I say, hoping for her to expand a little.
“Can you even remember?” laughs Alyssa.
“I remember talking to that donkey,” I tell them.
“Do you remember pretending to be a seed with Swiss John?” Sonja laughs. “Oh, and wrestling with Hedrick?”
“Hedrick? Oh yes, good-old Hedrick!” I laugh, while wondering who on earth Hedrick might be!
I do hope it’s not the name of the donkey.
I leave them behind to their girl talk as great big dirty blobs of rain hit my face and I begin the ascent into the hills of the Sierra de Atapuerca. In the thick black fog I first overtake one and then another horse-faced Dutch girl, who both look surprisingly like the Manchester United and Dutch international Ruud van Nistelrooy.
I feel an air of animosity between them, and I think they are not talking to each other for some reason. They look like they could do with some serious cheering up, but luckily for them I’m in no mood to take out my harmonica and entertain or rub some deep heat on my bobby’s helmet and do a rain dance for them. As I deem by their faces that they are totally and hopelessly miserable, I decide to get away from them as quickly as possible, as they are putting my karma totally out of kilter with their sour and brooding energies.
At the top of the sierras, the mists close in and I feel like the last man standing. On my left is a rickety old barbed-wire fence and beyond it no-man’s-land. A crack of lightning illuminates the sky, followed by a loud boom of thunder this time. It painfully rattles through my brain, and here I am a perfect conductor for a million volts of wrath. Now would be a good time for God to strike me down for all my past and present ill behaviors and religious misdemeanors.
But to put it in the immortal words of the great chief Sitting Bull:
“Today is not a good day to die!”
“Today is in fact a shit day to die!”
The rain lashes down even heavier as I head farther into the storm and I’m soaked to the bone. As the mists clear, I finally pick up the arrows on a tarmac road. Up ahead in the distance, one tall and one small person walk hand in hand. As I get closer I hear the voices of a woman and child. As I pass by, the mother says a staunch “Hello” and the little boy just smiles with his cheeky little SpongeBob SquarePants face, absolutely soaked to the bone, poor little fella. I wish I had some of those boiled sweets left. They might cheer him up a bit.
In the village of Orbaneja I dive out of the rain into a roadside bar for a warm-up and a coffee. Sitting at the table next to me is a strange German couple I haven’t seen before. She looks very fresh, strong, and healthy. Amazonian almost, with a face that wouldn’t look out of place in a Yankee sandwich on the front cover of a hard-core porn magazine. But her lover looks the total opposite. It looks to me as if she’s wearing him out, the lucky bastard. It’s not fair! She should be with someone like me. I could handle it. No problemo!
The doors opens and in walk mother and son. I quickly deduce from her age and his height that she must have had the little chappie quite early in life. She must be in her mid-twenties and the boy prepubescent. It happens! A boy I know back at home got his sixteen-year-old babysitter pregnant when he was just twelve, the dirty little fecker! But like I say, it happens.
The tiny boy takes off his wet jacket, and a very large and very wet pair of breasts flop out from under the wet T-shirt.
The poor-old Spanish barman almost eats his lit cigarette in shock, while Spongepants delves in her pack for a dry top.
All her stuff is wet through, so the little girl squeaks faintly to her friend, who has a massive hissy fit as she goes through her own pack to find a dry T-shirt for her wet little friend, which she thrusts angrily in her face. Poor Spongepants squeaks a faint thank you and heads for the bathroom, while grumpy bollocks sorts through her pack, sighing and moaning. Obviously she’s the one who wears the strap-on (I mean trousers) in that relationship!
With all this commotion going on, I find myself staring at the large wall-mounted television, watching a disturbing daytime programme about ladies’ incontinence problems, with a life-size model of the internal and external parts of a lady’s anatomy on the screen above me.
“Nice program!” says Butch.
“Err, yeah!” I nervously agree.
Her little friend comes back from the toilet with a dry top on, and her nipples almost knock my hat off. I don’t know where to look—fannies and bumholes, on the telly, little boy’s tits, or the porn star sitting canoodling behind me!
The Lord definitely moves in mysterious ways—either that or he has a wicked sense of humor. The seven-foot German naturist at Roncesvalles, with a big loud mouth and an acorn-sized excuse for a cock; now a dwarflike girl with 34GG breasts and her bossy lesbian lover; and finally a dominant, sexually athletic female with a sickly weak male! I finish my coffee staring at the television as a lady’s intimate parts are being tapped with a stick by a mad-looking professor and I think it’s time to leave.
“Butch and Spongepants,” I christen the lesbian lovers.
The cold rain brings me back to my senses, but I can’t stop thinking about the two girls and what they get up to in their fully equipped lesbian dungeon. My fantasy comes to an end as a group of cackling French biddies overtake me quickly and the beautiful countryside making way for the dirty and industrial.
Cars and lorries scream along the motorway and the air becomes foul with the fumes and the smells of the big city. Maybe I ought to get myself a room for the night with some fine wines and Belgian chocolates. I’ll invite Butch and Spongepants for a bit of lesbian entertainment. But I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of a shop window. “Maybe not!” I look like a homeless crack fiend. Toxic sweat oozes from my pores, leaving huge salty marks all over my ripped shirt, with scabs and sores on my ears, lips, and face. My hands have been itching so badly that I’ve scratched every tiny blister red raw and my face says I need a fix!
At a busy junction the arrows have completely vanished off the face of the earth. So again, I follow my instincts and signs for the cathedral. My hangover is really starting to kick in badly now and I’m getting more and more stressed out. So I light up a Ducados to help me think. After two hits the whole pack goes in the bin, closely followed by the carefully extinguished offender, and now I feel like shit.
Luckily I spot the German couple from the café studying a map, but suddenly they dart off and I give chase. They are a hard act to follow. Eventually, after chasing them for about a half mile and losing them a couple of times, they finally stop and get out their map. “The pilgrims’ hostel?” I ask them in hopeful expectation, but they both shrug and shake their heads.
“No, it’s not on our map,” says the sickly man. “No, we are looking for the Crown Plaza Hotel,” says the sex kitten, almost purring with delight. The lovers shrug and walk off, leaving me standing on the busy city corner.
“Thanks a million!” I curse. I bet they even made arrangements with Butch and Spongepants to join them in their suite for some debauched sexual antics. I scratch and bleed some more in utter frustration while I curse the yellow arrow man, yet again!
“It’s all your fucking fault, you bastard!” I shout at the sky. Probably the exact words I would say to him before tipping the yellow paint over his head, then hitting him repeatedly with the tin.
Eventually a flurry of yellow arrows rain down on me and I find myself in the outskirts of the city, lost and confused. A kindly Japanese pilgrim coming the other way directs me to the hostel.
“Rápido,” he says. “The beds are running out.”
I step up a gear and come to what can only be described as a jerry-built pilgrims’ hostel, looking like the set of The Great Escape meets Auf Wiedersehen, Pet!
All we need now is a machine-gun tower, a pallet of bricks, and Jimmy Nail in his baggy underpants, stamping our credentials while swigging from a bottle of Beck’s lager.